Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

What's a moodily lit Los Angeles cityscape doing on the cover of American Theatre? Is it there to illustrate some eggheaded critical thesis about "life as art," served up under the overused and dependably unspecific headline "All the World's a Stage"?

No, this issue's cover story doesn't traffic in artsy generalities. It does just the opposite, in fact, viewing the work of the 24-year-old Cornerstone Theater Company—and the creative journey of its artistic director Michael John Garcés—in vividly specific terms. Gary Leonard's cover shot of a stretch of Traction Avenue in downtown L.A. was taken during the August '08 run of Cornerstone's attraction, a play (penned by Page Leong and directed by Garcés) about the real-life denizens of this arts-district neighborhood, based on interviews with the locals and featuring many of them as performers. Here the avenue is the stage and the buildings on the block are the set. How much more specific can you get?

Which is one of critic Steven Leigh Morris's main points in his profile of Garcés, who assumed the reins of the community-oriented Cornerstone company some four years ago: "This hunger for a connection to the place, the people and the accrued energy of the life and history of a particular setting," Morris writes, "is what make Garcés a good fit for Cornerstone."

It makes him a good fit for American Theatre, as well, considering the watchful eye the magazine has kept on the accomplishments and the evolution of Cornerstone since it was launched as a peripatetic troupe by Bill Rauch, Alison Carey and several of their Harvard cohorts in 1986. The company's first mention came in Nov. '87 in an article by R.J. Cutler (whom you may know as the director of the recent documentary film The September Issue, about fashion maven Anna Wintour) that catalogued Cornerstone's adventures in Miami Beach (with a version of the Auden-Isherwood play The Dog Beneath the Skin, altered to deal with the AIDS epidemic), southern Virginia (an outdoor, interracial Our Town), Marmath, N.D. (Hamlet, with 10 percent of the town's population in the cast), and Marfa, Tex. (where Noel Coward's Hay Fever was set to Mexican folk music and rechristened That Marfa Fever). Cornerstone hit the cover two years later (May '89) with "Verona, Mississippi," arts reporter Robert Coe's masterful account of the company's interracial Romeo and Juliet and its indelible impact on the citizens of Port Gibson, Miss.

Since then, we've carried accounts of various other Cornerstone projects (March '00, Dec. '00), reported on a groundbreaking TCG National Conference session on the company's 2001-05 faith-based theatre cycle (Sept. '05) and delved into Rauch's generative ideas about the role of theatre in society (Oct. '06). Add this issue's Garcés portrait to that lineup of coverage and the result is a panoramic vision of one remarkable company's quarter-century enterprise. — Jim O'Quinn

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